Goobi's Soggy Shit

I hate error messages. It’s what drove me nuts on Windows, and keeps bugging the crap out of me all over the place. The very sound of a ‘ting’ or a annoying little pop up right when I’m working, makes me realise that there is something wrong with the way things are at the moment, and they need to change.

The iPhone has got the worst notification system on the planet. Think about it. You’re working on something, and the pop up shows up requiring you to take action. Until and unless you tap the OK button, you can’t do anything. This is worsened by the fact that some apps like to throw you several of them at a time. Take the built in Mail app itself. If there’s no internet connection present, it will throw up at least three error messages that you have to get rid of.

By comparison, if you look at the Palm Pre or the Google Android phones, the notification tray system is much more efficient and unobtrusive. I only hope Apple isn’t stubborn enough to keep their crappy pop ups for the rest of the iPhone’s life. This is after all only going to get worse once the push notification service makes its way into third party apps. The horror.

Moving to the Mac, while we don’t have the system tray pop up mess like in Windows, there are certain apps that insist on throwing pop ups. iChat is one of the most annoying apps on the Mac. Every time it disconnects or has some issue, it not only throws you multiple error messages, it also continually bounces the Dock icon. EventBox is another application that won’t get rid of a connection error message even after things are fine. These are just two apps among the many that continually spit out error messages like I was some kind of message boy.

Growl on the other hand, is a great system for error reports. It’s silent, can be customized to just how obvious you want it to be, and fades away the moment it notifies you. I also like the way some apps like Transmission notify you by ringing a dock badge when a download is complete, instead of just popping up a system tray message like uTorrent on Windows.

Dreamweaver looking smug with its non-error

Error messages by their very nature are unnatural. You don’t see an error message in nature do you? In my honest opinion, and I pray that the gods are listening in, error messages have plagued us for long enough. The ultimate solution to this problem is yet to be found (it’s not Growl, no). My basic philosophy behind a perfect error free world would be the user goes to the error message instead of it forcing itself upon the user. “Why the fuck isn’t this app working? Let me check if there are any error messages” should be the standard outlook in designing these things. As for notifications, you could growl them if you want or just turn em off for good.

Of course, my five minute solution shouldn’t be considered as an ultimate method, no. All I’m asking is that someone ‘up there’ think about a better way to keep these apps from bugging the crap out of me.